xray wrote...
On Sun, 22 Jan 2006, John Miles wrote:
Winfield says...
That would be the day. What's the right price for your 8566B with
manuals, etc.? I see Nick at Ridge Equipment has one up for $9k,
but I doubt he'll sell it. Looking at the last 30 days, I see one
fellow who had two "untested" units, accepting $3100 "best offers"
for each, and another guy who got a $2700 "buy-it-now" sale for his
"untested" unit with a "dim screen". All three "untested" units had
photos indicating reasonable physical condition and some kind of
apparently-proper display operation. There's another one, "as is"
with a dark-screen photo, starting at $6499, with no bidders.

It's tough to say. At the end of the day it's worth whatever the
second-highest bidder thinks it's worth. Ordinarily, I'd wait for
all those others to sell or otherwise disappear from the field before
putting one up for sale, but I think this one will out-compete the
others without any trouble... at least among buyers who know what
they're looking for. A dim CRT is not a good thing on these units,
because the focus is the first thing to go. By the time the emission
is down, you don't get a very clean image.

At any rate, a $9K starting bid on an 8566B with a DOA-only guarantee
is just a waste of a listing fee, and everybody's time to boot. Much
better to start low and encourage people to look at the item on its
merits. I'd be surprised if mine doesn't land in the $6K-$7K
neighborhood. $8K-$9K is a high but still-fair price, if someone has
the cash on hand and has been waiting for the right one.

So, am I right? John was not surprized (price) and Win is now the owner?

Correct. $6,380 after 16 bids from 12 bidders. I started the bidding
at $1.00, "aikidoka.steve" stole it from me with $2.00, and the battle
was joined. Last night electron55 took it from calibrate72pb with his
$6,280 bid at 18:29:44 and I outbid him one second later, 15 seconds
before the auction was to end at 9:30pm EST. My sniper service placed
a bid nine seconds later, but it wasn't needed, I was already a winner.
:-) http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=7583597242

I also grabbed John's 8568A 1.5GHz RF Section for $610.

These beauties will replace my inferior HP 8569B spectrum analyzer.

Yikes. This means I have something besides political opinions in common
with Win. We both have SA's that John M used to own and spent many hours
fixing up for us.

We've got to stop meeting like this. :-)


--
Thanks,
- Win

John Miles wrote:
I'm looking to clear out some clean, working equipment at the end of a
couple of long-term personal projects. This shortened URL will take you
to eBay's "View Seller's Items" page for my account:

http://snipurl.com/ls89

Highlights include the nicest HP 8566B spectrum analyzer out of several
that I've owned; an HP 8662A with OEM manuals and brand-new PS filter
caps; and an HP 5345A counter with enough spares and accessories to
satisfy any ECL computing buff.

Most of these items include manuals, and all of them will be sold with
3-day buyer inspection periods. Local pickup in Seattle OK. Even if
you're not in the market, several of the listings include some
interesting HP Journal .PDFs and other literature. Check 'em out!

-- jm

------------------------------------------------------
http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx
Note: My E-mail address has been altered to avoid spam
------------------------------------------------------
As a relative novice electronic nerd what type of work did you
do with this equipment, as a hobby?

I can't vouchesafe John's decision to give up his treasured gear,
but I can say John's loss is my gain. John's 8566B is a beautiful
machine and several of us are having lots of fun with it. My tech
is making a new rack for it (and several other machines, together
far too big to fit on a bench), then I'll add an ethernet-to-GPIB
network connection, software, and it'll be ready for prime time.

Quite a few of the projects at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx -- plus some
smaller fry that I haven't had time to document yet.

Glad to hear it's working well. Agreed, its size and weight is a real
problem, and not just for shipping. I'll definitely own another of
those beasts at some point, when I have more room than I do now. The
important thing is that it's in appreciative hands. :-)

If you plan to use my GPIB software with it, be sure to download a
recent copy. I hosed the phase-noise app pretty badly in my last
"slipstream" update a few weeks ago, and only heard about it last week.
The version that's up there now is fine.

Would you be so kind as to post the url for your website? I would like to
get a copy of your software.

Thanks, K

wrote in message
ups.com...
Glad to hear it's working well. Agreed, its size and weight is a real
problem, and not just for shipping. I'll definitely own another of
those beasts at some point, when I have more room than I do now. The
important thing is that it's in appreciative hands. :-)

If you plan to use my GPIB software with it, be sure to download a
recent copy. I hosed the phase-noise app pretty badly in my last
"slipstream" update a few weeks ago, and only heard about it last week.
The version that's up there now is fine.

Would you be so kind as to post the url for your website?
I would like to get a copy of your software.

See the first link at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/ (or download the setup
program directly at
http://www.speakeasy.org/~jmiles1/ke5fx/gpib/setup.exe ).

wrote...

If you plan to use my GPIB software with it, be sure to download a
recent copy. I hosed the phase-noise app pretty badly in my last
"slipstream" update a few weeks ago, and only heard about it last
week. The version that's up there now is fine.

http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/ Thanks for the heads-up. That's v1.05,
the Jan 14, 2006 edition? Which program was updated to fix the
phase-noise problem? The pn program's source code says 13-Jul-05,
although the pn.cpp file date is 12-Feb-06.

I like the part where you get the "number of 1000-ns intervals
since 1-Jan-1601 UTC" :-)


--
Thanks,
- Win

Winfield Hill wrote:
http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/ Thanks for the heads-up. That's v1.05,
the Jan 14, 2006 edition? Which program was updated to fix the
phase-noise problem? The pn program's source code says 13-Jul-05,
although the pn.cpp file date is 12-Feb-06.

The broken version was 1.05, but I "slipstreamed" the fix into the same
release without updating the version stamp.

I really should've bumped the version number when I posted the fix, but
it'll be pretty obvious if your copy has the bug. It will appear to
work, but it will always start the PN sweep at 0 Hz rather than the
minimum offset you specify. That makes the sweep take much longer than
necessary, and the trace information at offsets below 10x the
analyzer's minimum RBW is meaningless.

Basically, if you downloaded it around the time I posted all those
auctions, you probably got the bad version.

I like the part where you get the "number of 1000-ns intervals
since 1-Jan-1601 UTC" :-)

Heh... I've wondered where Microsoft came up with that; it might have
come from the Unix world. There's a lot of weirdness in the calendar
business, and it's usually less arbitrary, but more obscure, than it
seems at first.

-- john, KE5FX

Winfield Hill wrote:
http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/ Thanks for the heads-up. That's v1.05,
the Jan 14, 2006 edition? Which program was updated to fix the
phase-noise problem? The pn program's source code says 13-Jul-05,
although the pn.cpp file date is 12-Feb-06.

The broken version was 1.05, but I "slipstreamed" the fix into the same
release without updating the version stamp.

I really should've bumped the version number when I posted the fix, but
it'll be pretty obvious if your copy has the bug. It will appear to
work, but it will always start the PN sweep at 0 Hz rather than the
minimum offset you specify. That makes the sweep take much longer than
necessary, and the trace information at offsets below 10x the
analyzer's minimum RBW is meaningless.

Basically, if you downloaded it around the time I posted all those
auctions, you probably got the bad version.

I like the part where you get the "number of 1000-ns intervals
since 1-Jan-1601 UTC" :-)

Heh... I've wondered where Microsoft came up with that; it might have
come from the Unix world. There's a lot of weirdness in the calendar
business, and it's usually less arbitrary, but more obscure, than it
seems at first.

-- john, KE5FX